D Language Server

marketplace.visualstudio.com

59 points·jblindsay··6 comments

It's amazing to me that Microsoft came up with a spec that seems to have been so effective and very well missing from editors to get a bit of a bump in regards to not having the burden of reimplementing the same handling for different languages. This plugin is awesome because it reuses some of D's already existing tech that predates LangServ but now that there's an open standard for all languages focus can be made towards LangServ. D remains one of my favorite languages. My only complaint is tooling support, which is improving thanks to efforts like LangServ.

I'm also really impressed with language server adoption. It's really quite revolutionary. No longer does any editor/ide implementation have to roll their own parsers for every supported language. I was doing program static analysis 10-15 years ago and this was always a major obstacle.

LSP concept was not invented at Microsoft but they used their market power and VS Code momentum to force the various ecosystems into it. I want to claim that this is Erich Gamma's doing (who also worked on other plugin systems notable Eclipse before) but do not know for sure.

Erich Gamma works at Microsoft.

In Zürich. At VS Code. I think Erich pushed this concept with VS Code.

I think to remember that the original out of process language server and using of a generic protocol was somewhere in the vim/emacs sphere. Was mentioned by the VS Code team afair.

https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/P...

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